[jeffdavis]

Interesting point.

I don't know if I'd pick Java as a comparison point because the ecosystem is unimaginably large, so it's hard to compare to Haskell/OCaml. A better one might be Golang or ruby.

I think ML languages just never made the case that other languages are bad enough for the particular thing someone is doing now, e.g. a web app. If you hit a NULL, you get an exception, track it down, probably not a huge issue. The best case could be made for ML on security grounds, but unfortunately nobody cares about security.

On the other hand, people were convinced that C/C++ were bad after decades of people saying so. But people didn't feel like they had an alternative until rust came along.